Social networking is rapidly becoming a phenomenon in all societies of the world. A few prominent examples include Face Book, Twitter™, and Linkedin®. Consumers, enterprises, organizations, movie stars, politicians, sports stars, and others utilize these social networking sites to communicate and in some cases collaborate with one another.
One area where social networking and collaboration has not made any real progress is decision making.
With decision making, a common challenge regularly encountered is the need to make a decision with input from others. Sometimes a decision is as simple as where to go to lunch whereas other times a decision can be a very complex process of deciding where in the world the next face-to-face meeting should be held for a globally distributed organization. There are many issues involved in making collaborative decisions including: 1) who the decision-makers are; 2) what constitutes success or completion in making the decision; 3) how the decision will be carried out once made; 4) how past decisions may be used or may influence future decisions; and 5) how the decision-making process can be conducted when the decision-makers are geographically dispersed throughout the world.
Furthermore, existing collaboration services are commonly fraught with issues of: 1) digital identity (knowing who is involved in the collaboration); 2) policy governing the collaboration; 3) resources to conduct the collaboration; etc.